Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with
all the fixins. And it does it with such quality and efficiency
it’ll produce “gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.”

With a conveyor belt-type system the burgers are freshly ground,
shaped and grilled to the customer’s liking. And only when the
burger’s finished cooking does Alpha slice the tomatoes and
pickles and place them on the burger as fresh as can be. Finally,
the machine wraps the burger up for serving.

Alpha churns out a painless 360 hamburgers per hour. Saving money
with Alpha is pretty easy to imagine. You don’t even need
cashiers or servers. Customers could just punch in their order,
pay, and wait at a dispensing window.

For their next model Momentum Machines plans on adding a custom
meat grinding feature so it can mix different meats – 1/3 pork,
2/3 bison sounds like a tasty combo – in the same burger. They’ll
also give it gourmet cooking abilities that seasoned chefs use
such as charring the burger while retaining its juiciness.

The company plans on launching the first ever restaurant chain
with a cook staff made entirely of robots. But not only might we
soon find Alpha’s creations at local burger joints, but the
company is also targeting convenience stores, food trucks, and
somehow even vending machines.

Recent research conducted by the consultancy Ernst & Young
LLP suggests that the average annual labor cost per worker rose
to more than 40,000 yuan ($6,400) in 2011, from less than 25,000
yuan five years ago.

Given the context, it's easy to calculate the tradeoffs of
getting a robot. "In fact, industrial robots are already cheaper
than workers in China's eastern regions," said Wang Tianmiao, who
heads the expert panel of robot technology under the State
High-Tech Development Plan.

Wang said a typical industrial robot costs around 300,000 yuan
and has annual maintenance costs of 20,000 yuan. The total layout
of 500,000 yuan over 10 years is considerably less than that for
a 6,000-yuan-a-month technician, and robots can work three times
more efficiently.

Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is
terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost
in developed countries the world over.

And the situation is even worse than it appears.

Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely
to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What's
more, these jobs aren't just being lost to China and other
developing countries, and they aren't just factory work.
Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home
to two-thirds of all workers.

They're being obliterated by technology.

Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of
other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and
powerful and capable of doing more efficiently tasks that humans
have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future
when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by
our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future
has arrived.

"There's no sector of the economy that's going to get a pass,"
says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote "The
Lights in the Tunnel," a book predicting widespread job losses.
"It's everywhere."

The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States,
half the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession were in
industries that pay middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to
$68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since
the recession ended in June 2009 are in midpay industries. Nearly
70 percent are in low-pay industries, 29 percent in industries
that pay well.

Experts warn that this "hollowing out" of the middle-class
workforce is far from over. They predict the loss of millions
more jobs as technology becomes even more sophisticated and
reaches deeper into our lives.

The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that
programmers can write software for — an accountant checking a
list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal
reviewing documents for key words to help in a case. As software
becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include
those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers —
workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.

Seemingly, there is no end to this. Software robots handle voice
activated queries and mechanical robots replace humans in
manufacturing. If a job is repetitive and programmable, a robot
is out to get it. That even includes minimum wage jobs in
manufacturing and in food service.